After the Fall

Forty years ago President John Kennedy was assassinated. In the decades since most Americans have come to believe that a conspiracy, not a lone gunman, was the culprit. According to a recent ABC poll only 32 percent of Americans think that Oswald alone and unaided was the killer. From shortly after the tragedy until now, Americans have steadily believed that one madman could not have done this terrible thing.

The day it happened I left my fancy private school on New York’s upper West Side. It was a bad neighborhood then, not like now where if you threw a rock you’d have a pretty good chance of hitting a millionaire. Back then, in the shank of the civil rights struggle, the surrounding slums in that neighborhood assured my school’s excellence in track; we all could run like the wind to escape the kids our own age who would swoop down on us for our money and watches. Our blazers were a dead giveaway that we had what they needed.

That afternoon, grief stricken, I wandered down a known dodgy block unthinking, and truth be told, uncaring. My President was dead. Somehow I had wandered off alone. My blazer flapped in an unseasonably warm wind. I remember that it was a clear beautiful day. Maybe it wasn’t, but that's how I remember it. Clear. Leading up to the holiday season. On the brink of Thanksgiving.

Our athletic coach had told us all in the gym. It seemed right that way. He was clean cut and square jawed and his name was Dudley. He was the man who represented the moral clarity of the playing field. Balls were fair or foul. Sportsmanship was good or bad. There was no gray. It was a universe where conduct was clearly right or wrong, like the clearly blue sky that New York afternoon.

I was a youngster, not even in High School. I didn’t know about the relativity of good and evil. The tragedy was caused, said the newscaster on the TV, “by a punk with a mail order rifle.” Even the TV was black and white in those days of either and or.

Camelot was like that, clean and straight and true. The killing of Jack, of JFK, the brave salute, the brave 34-year-old widow, was theatre as clear in purpose and moral as anything from the ancient Greeks. It was a great wrong in a time of either right or wrong.

It was the first time TV had shown us reality, not quite live, but almost. Live reality was still a few short years away. But it showed us the scramble of the young wife towards the back of the open limousine, the young President slumping towards her. It showed us the unrehearsed innocence of reaction. The unrehearsed mayhem of the man in the hallway of the jail in Dallas, and the other man, wearing a white hat, moving forward and gut-shooting him in front of everyone just like that. It showed us the innocence of a police force unaccustomed to random acts of violence.

Let alone the well-rehearsed reactions and the well rehearsed acts of violence coordinated by cell phone to the minute that are countries, even continents, apart. It was still years away from these orchestrated terror attacks, and the shock and awe live in your living room and the instant reactions of heads of states and pundits giving the first draft of history its second, glossy draft before the original's ink has dried.

And it was years, though not so many, away from conspiracies demonstrable and clear. Before Bobby and Martin and all the others. Before Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and all the others.

Before it was all live on TV. Before the backroom deals were as plain as the perp walks of corporate fat cats, political operatives and mafia Teflon dons. As clear as that crisp weekend in November.

But on that day I wandered in a bad neighborhood and did not notice it. And then a black boy just my age walked up to me, normally a highly dangerous interaction. Our eyes met and an arm-length away we stopped. “They shot the President in Dallas,” he said quietly and sadly in a voice you would use just for talking, “Did you hear?”

“Yes,” I said to him and we shook hands almost easily. “Yes, Yes.” Then, with a single wave, joined for a moment, we parted, each walking alone and slowly into the oncoming dusk of that long ago fall.
¶ 5:40 PM